Dell Denies Utilizing AMD Athlon 64, Opteron Chips.

Representatives from Dell, who claimed the company had been looking into AMD 64-bit technology enthusiastically earlier this year, denied late last week that Dell will use those chips in its own PCs. The same kinds of claims were said by Dell about AMD’s past microprocessors, such as AMD Athlon. The company will continue to offer Intel only desktops, workstations and servers.

“To go with an AMD solution becomes problematic for us from a cost and kind of an ice-breaking standpoint,” Dell President Kevin Rollins said on Wednesday to this news-paper. “We believe 64-bit will be a technology customers will want and will migrate to it. It is a market that's emerging but not quite ripe yet.”

Dell, who has always been probably the closest partner of Intel Corporation, constantly expresses interest in AMD technology before it is officially unveiled, but rejects the possibility of its adopting after it makes it into the market.

Describing some of Dell’s customers as being at the “lunatic fringe” of computer use – those users who are happy to remove and replace various hardware – Michael Dell, the CEO of Dell said in February 2000 in an interview to ZDNet: “We found the AMD environment to be much more fragile ... than equivalent Intel systems.” The claim was a strange one, given that the original AMD Athlon processors rolled-out in 1999 had the unprecedented success among PC enthusiasts!

They say that Dell always receives CPUs from Intel with tangible discounts in exchange to exclusive partnership with the largest Santa Clara, California-based chipmaker. As a result, Dell will hardly ever deploy AMD technology in its solutions due to “cost issues”.